Making room under the Gazebo: Accommodating newcomers and power users alike

Description

In large part, the recent advancements in robotics have been made possible by open source tools. The Open Source Robotics Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software in robotics, supports two main projects—ROS (Robot Operating System) and Gazebo, a multirobot simulator—both of which are widely used by the global robotics community, including industry, academia, and hobbyists.

Gazebo is a simulator that calculates rigid-body dynamics, generates all kinds of sensor data, and allows user interaction through both a C++ API and a powerful graphical interface. Some of the uses for Gazebo include robotics competitions like the DARPA Robotics Challenge, continuous integration, prototyping, and education.

In its 14 years, Gazebo has been extensively adopted in the academia, by professors and graduate students who have a strong background in computer science. More recently, the Gazebo team has been focusing on making Gazebo more accessible to a wider audience without a technical background, such as high-school students and engineers from fields other than computer science. Louise Poubel outlines some of the approaches being taken to broaden Gazebo’s user base by simplifying the process for developers to use its libraries and facilitating the contribution workflow for new contributors. This has involved improving the graphical interface, documentation, API, developer tools, and community discussion platforms.